January Webinars In our continued quest to provide you with training and education resources, I am pleased to share the webinars that we have set up for January. These are free, but they do fill up and you should definitely register ahead of time. All times are PT and each webinar runs for one hour:

Are you keeping up with the latest developments in AWS-land? Do you have a good understanding of Amazon Redshift, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Cognito? Do you know what IoT is all about, and do you have firm grasp of the best security practices for your cloud workloads? Do you understand the EC2 Spot Market, and do you know how to use it to your advantage?

In pursuit of our focus on training and education, I am pleased to share the webinars that we have on tap for October and November. These are free, but they do fill up and I suggest that you register ahead of time. All times are PT and each webinar runs for one hour:

We are 60 days away from AWS re:Invent 2016! I’m already working on a big pile of blog posts and my colleagues are working night and day to make sure that you have plenty of opportunities to learn about our services. With two new venues, hands-on labs, certification exams, a full day of additional content, and the re:Source Mini Con (full day technical deep dives), and twice as many breakout sessions as last year, I am confident that you will have plenty to do during the day. After that, we have some great after-hours experiences on the agenda, including the famous wing eating contest, and expanded Pub Crawl, a Harley Ride, the re:Play party, and the re:Invent 5k (that’s kilometers, not kilobytes).

In order to make sure that you are fully prepared before you arrive in Las Vegas, we have put together three webinars. These are free and optional, but I’d recommend attending in order to make sure that you are positioned to make the most of your trip.

Here’s what we have:

How to Reserved Your Seats -We expect to have over 450 breakout sessions spread across 20 or so tracks. This year, based on your feedback, you will be able to reserve your seats ahead of time. That way you can make better plans and remove some uncertainty. In the webinar, you’ll learn how to reserve seats and build your calendar using our online tool. Here are the webinar sessions (all times are PT):

Deep Dive on AWS re:Invent 2016 Breakout Sessions – Each of the tracks that I mentioned above will contain sessions at the introductory, advanced, and expert levels. This webinar will help you to learn more about the tracks and the sessions so that you can start to prepare your schedule. Again, the sessions, with times in PT:

Know Before You Go – The webinar will provide you with the big picture: keynotes, breakout sessions, training and certification, re:Invent Central, networking opportunities, and our popular after-hours activities.

PS -As we get closer to the big event, I know that many past attendees and AWS Partners will be publishing how-to guides of their own. Time permitting (hah!) I’ll put together a round-up of these posts.

At the beginning of the month I blogged about the value of continuing education and shared an infographic that ilustrated the link between continued education and increased pay, higher effectiveness, and decreased proclivity to seek other employment. The pace of AWS innovation means that there’s always something new to learn. One way to do this is to attend some of our webinars. We design these webinars with a focus on training and education, and strongly believe that you can walk away from them ready, willing, and able to use a new AWS service or to try a new aspect of an existing one.

To that end, we have another great selection of webinars on the schedule for September. As always they are free, but they do fill up and I strongly suggest that you register ahead of time. All times are PT, and each webinar runs for one hour:

Everyone on the AWS team understands the value of educating our customers on the best ways to use our services. We work hard to create documentation, training materials, and blog posts for you! We run live events such as our Global AWS Summits and AWS re:Invent where the focus is on education. Last but not least, we put our heads together and create a fresh lineup of webinars for you each and every month.

We have a great selection of webinars on the schedule for August. As always they are free, but they do fill up and I strongly suggest that you register ahead of time. All times are PT, and each webinar runs for one hour:

Our 2016 series of webinars continues with a strong set of 200-level topics in April. The webinars are free, but space is limited and you should sign up ahead of time if you would like to attend. Here’s what we have on the calendar for the last week of April (all times are Pacific):

Tuesday, April 26 Are you ready to launch and connect to your first EC2 instance? Do you want to learn how to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store and share files? Our getting started webinar will show you how to do both.

Do you want to learn how to use Apache Spark to analyze real-time streams of data on an Amazon EMR cluster? Do you want to know how to use Spark as part of a system that includes Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, and other big data tools? This webinar will show you how to use Spark to address common big data use cases.

Are you interested in running a commercial relational database in the cloud? Do you want to know more about best practices for running single and multiple database instances, or do you have questions about costs and licensing? Attend this webinar to learn more about Amazon RDS running Oracle.

Wednesday, April 27 In today’s real-time world, going from raw data to insights as quickly as possible has become a must. Fortunately, a number of AWS tools can help you to capture, store, and analyze real-time streaming data. Attend this webinar to learn about Amazon Kinesis Streams, Lambda, and Spark Streaming on Amazon EMR.

As you move your business and your applications to the cloud, you should also look at modernizing your development and deployment practices. For example, many AWS customers use tools like AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy to implement continuous delivery. Attend this webinar to learn more about what this means and how to put it in to practice in your own organization.

Now that Amazon S3 is a decade old, we have a wealth of experience to share about the best ways to use it for backup, compliance, archiving, and many other purposes. This webinar will share best practices for keeping your data safe, and will also provide an overview of several different transfer services.

Thursday, April 28AWS Lambda brings some new flexibility to the development and deployment process. When used in conjunction with AWS Storage Gateway, it can be used as the basis for an automated development workflow that easily supports distinct development, staging, and production environments. Attend this webinar to learn more.

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible database engine that can boost performance, reliability, and availability while reducing the total cost of ownership. Join this webinar to learn more about Aurora and to better understand how to migrate your existing on-premises or cloud-based databases to it.

Last month I challenged you to learn something new in 2016 and offered up our January webinar series as a starting point. We’ve put together another strong lineup for February and I’d like to share it with you now. As always, the webinars are free but space is limited and you should sign up ahead of time if you would like to attend.

Here’s what we have in store for February and early March (all times are Pacific):

Tuesday, February 23Many developers are using containers to simplify the packaging, deployment, and operation of their applications. This deep-dive webinar will show you how to use Amazon EC2 Container Service to simplify the use of Docker in production.

AWS Lambda gives you the power to build serverless applications that require no administration and can scale with no effort. Join our webinar to learn how Lambda can now access functionality within a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud):

Tuesday, March 1 & Thursday, March 3 Migrating your Windows-based applications to the cloud does not necessarily entail stepping out of a familiar and comfortable environment. During our virtual hands-on labs an instructor will guide you through the process of configuring, launching, and securing a Windows virtual machine in the AWS Cloud:

Did you resolve to learn something new in 2016? If so, you should attend an AWS webinar!

Each month, we run a series of webinars that are designed to bring you up to speed on the latest AWS services & features, and to make sure that you are aware of the best ways to put them to use. The webinars are conducted by senior AWS Product Managers and Solution Architects and often include a guest speaker from our customer base.

The webinars are free but “seating” is limited and you should definitely sign up ahead of time if you want to attend (all times are Pacific). Here’s what we have in store this month:

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices interact with cloud applications and other devices. This webinar will show you how constrained devices can send data to the cloud and receive commands back to the device.

Many developers are using containers to simplify the packaging, deployment, and operation of their applications. This webinar will show you how to use Amazon EC2 Container Service to simplify the use of Docker in production.